"We have no army in England beyond what is required for police purposes; nor shall we have one until the Britons, still happily separated from the total world, determine, by a general conscription, to march with the rest of Europe, and to exchange a small standing army for a national force. And whilst we literally hold India with eighty thousand white faces, we freely allow the Native Powers to levy and to drill troops in numbers exceeding our own. Evidently our authorities are very sure of their affair. Possibly they rely upon the fact that the game is no longer worth the candle; that India, that golden land, has been squeezed till no more is to be got out of her. 'Poor India, every hair of her head is numbered!' said a mercantile traveller, when I explained to him the figures on the date trees; and, certainly, between the Abkari (excise) and the salt-tax, we have thoroughly emptied the pockets of the breechless population.
"But, happily, things are gradually getting to the worst, and we may fairly hope that they will surely mend. Presently we shall take a lesson from Russia, who manages her trans-Caucasian provinces by a mixture of foreign and native employés. Nothing more offends the patriotic Russian than to doubt that he is wholly European; and yet to the dash of Asiatic blood he owes many of his highest national gifts,—his facility in acquiring languages; his devotion to his Emperors, the 'Shadows of Bog upon Earth;' his subtle and persistent policy; his love of conquest and military glory; and his fatalistic calmness under fire.
"We shall remedy the chronic discontent of a pauper population by opening up new sources of wealth in reproductive works, in manufactures and mines. At present India is administered for the benefit of England, or rather, of the English trading classes, who must supply the public offices with paper and sealing-wax, and the soldiers and sepoys with broadcloth and ducks. The National Religion of England will become the State Church in India, and we shall cease to foster and encourage, by a fatuous and absurd toleration, the fanaticism of Pagan idolatry. We shall borrow from Russia another lesson of economy, by substituting military law and rule for the pseudo-constitutionalism with which we, like Portugal, have afflicted India; we shall relieve our great colony, or rather conquest, of such an incubus as Presidency Governors and Commanders-in-Chief, Members of Council and Chief Justices. We shall reserve High Courts and similar preserves for lawyers' game; but we shall confine them to the various capitals, where wealthy natives may play at law, and ruin themselves à discretion.
"With this money, now profligately wasted upon civil establishments, we shall maintain an efficient Native Army, which will deliver us from the feeble politic of 'purpose and no power.' At home a general conscription, or a revival of the Militia Act, will give us a force, between actives and reserves, of two millions of men. The first serious 'shake' in the East or the West will show us that our national existence depends upon this measure, or rather that the alternative will be subsiding into the position of Belgium and Holland. And finally, when Russia begins her railway from Tabriz to Teheran and Baghdad, we shall check her by the Euphrates Valley Line, at present our principal Colonial want. And thus the 'Ikbal,' or good fortune, which apparently departed with the defunct East India Company, will be inherited by the Imperial Rule.
"The Government of the Company, it must be remembered, was aristocratic,—an aristocracy of bales and barrels, if you please, but still, to a certain extent, a rule of honour. Its successor acts upon the latest and most modern rules of political economy; it buys its labour in the cheapest market, and it demands only a fair day and a half's work for a fair day's wage. It notably borrowed from China its system of competitive examinations, which examine all least worth examining,—that is, the memory and the receptivity, not the moral and physical value of its Mandarins. Some day, perhaps, we shall see a return of the well-abused system of patronage, whose evils can so easily be checked by the administration of proper tests, and by provisional appointments to be confirmed only after a sufficient period of practical trial.
"To an Englishman who has at heart the honour and interests of his native land, nothing is more offensive than the low standing taken by our writers in treating of the Central Asian Question, and the tone of despondency which contrasts so disparagingly with the high grounds assumed by the Russians. England accepted as a kind of boon the creation of a neutral zone,—a string of independent semi-barbarian States, separating the frontiers of the two great Asiatic Powers. Russia, with the moderation engendered by her intense vigour and vitality, throws this sop to Cerberus, perfectly certain that the measure is merely temporary, whilst the powerful war party which looks upon the Cesarewitch as its head, openly expresses its scorn and disgust. We are told by our Pundits that 'all we want is rest—rest from foreign wars, rest from political disturbance.' We want nothing of the kind: our only want is, de l'audace, de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace.
"We are assured that we are conservative, not aggressive; whereas our rivals are aggressive, not conservative; in other words, that they are young and active and strong, while we are old and stiff and weak. We are advised to push forward, because any check upon our frontier would raise a host of enemies in our troubled rear,—which means that our position in India is more or less precarious. We are informed in the same breath that Russia has certainly not contemplated anything like an invasion of India; and yet we are advised to take the strongest steps in order to secure ourselves from invasion.
"A curious comment, by the way, upon the first dictum is the tone of the young Grand Duke Nicholas' letters, published by Miss Fanny Lear, in which he considers an appointment to the Caucasus as the first step of a Russian march upon India. Again, we read the alarming sentence, 'If there was danger to British India from the attitude and possible designs of Russia twenty-eight years ago, that danger must be increased a hundred-fold at the present day.' Furthermore, we are threatened with the 'moral leverage' which Russia, by menacing India, can bring to bear upon us in Europe; and with the chronic conflagration which would result from the mere contiguity of a rival European Power; in other words, we are told that Russia can make India too hot to hold us,—as if we could not make, by means of China, Turkestan too hot to hold Russia. Her troops are ever moving on resistless as fate, whilst we are thoroughly alarmed by their advance: that is, Russia swoops like the hawk, while we cower like the pigeon.
"Hence, the perpetual reports of new invasion-routes from the North which fill our Press, the old Buroghil Pass being the latest 'fad.' And hence the trembling anxiety with which the Anglo-Indian eye was fixed upon the late Amir el-Muminin, Ya'akub Khan of Kashgar, as if a struggling little Moslem Prince, who would assuredly be crushed between the rival Colossi, Russia and China, held the destinies of British India in his weakling hand. Hence the exaggerated importance attached to what is called the 'Indian situation,' to the 'Russian glacis' on the north-east of Persia, and to the strategic approach from the south-eastern corner of Persia, 'which is so stealthily, but steadily progressing.' And hence, finally, the forcible feeble stand which we are making about the independence of villainous Bokhara, and the inviolability of pauper Merv—a village which once numbered a million of souls.
"This tone of excited despondency, this symptom of weakness and violence, has travelled far, and has already done great damage to our name. It has thoroughly complicated our relations with Afghanistan. As may be proved by any old map, that turbulent land of robber-chiefs has gained enormously, both in territory and in population, by our intervention. Yet Shere Ali Khan sulks and pouts because Lord Lawrence acknowledged his elder brother, the friendly Afzul Khan; because Lord Mayo did not anticipate his every wish, and because Lord Northbrook did not pay his subsidy—'tribute' I would rather call it—with all the regularity he desired. Hence he refused the Kashgar Mission, under pretext of being unable to protect the members,—'Their blood be upon their own heads if they come to Cabul!' Hence he will admit no English resident Agent; and the native Aakil-i-Sarkar-i-Angriz is hardly permitted to address him in Durbar. The fact is, this miserable Highland Chief believes, and has been taught by us to believe, that he holds 'the road to the English.' He is convinced that he has only to offer aid to the Russians in order to drive us out of India. That he hates us, we know: during the Sepoy Mutiny he urged in vain his wise old father, Dost Mohammed, to invade the Punjáb—a measure deprecated by Afzul Khan. That he despises us, we cannot fail to see; and not less can we fail to feel that our policy has given him a right to despise us.[12]